Wohnungsfrage publication series

(lifePR) (Berlin, 26.06.2015)
How can we create affordable living space? How do we provide opportunities for self-determination? In an exhibition, an academy and a series of publications, the Wohnungsfrage project examines the fraught relationship between architecture, housing, and social reality.

The first titles in the publication series - key historic works accompanied by new commentaries - have already been issued by Spector Books. In response to the world economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s, Martin Wagner's Das wachsende Haus (The Growing House) of 1932 presents models of homes that change according to the socio-economic circumstances of their inhabitants. Hannes Meyer's Co-op Interieur from 1926 is a manifesto for a radical anti-bourgeois interior. In three 1872 essays entitled Zur Wohnungsfrage (The Housing Question), Friedrich Engels analyzes the structural conditions of the housing shortage under capitalism. Upcoming publications in August 2015 include an edition on Proletarische Bauausstellung (Proletarian Building Exhibition) conceived by the Collective for a Socialist Architecture in 1931 as a response to the German Building Exhibition. The series is annotated by architects, academics and artists including Aristide Antonas, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Tom Avermaete, Franziska Bollerey, Heinz Deutschland, Tatjana Efrussi, Thomas Flierl, Raquel Franklin, Gregor Harbusch, Reinhold Martin, Pedro Moreira, Philipp Oswalt, Ludovica Scarpa, Tatjana Schneider, Neil Smith, Daniel Weiss, Karin Wilhelm and Andreas Zeese.

Autumn will see current international case studies, a contribution by the New York-based artist Amie Siegel and publications by the architects and Berlin initiatives involved in the Wohnungsfrage project. The collaborations are between the tenant group Kotti & Co and the San Diego-based Estudio Teddy Cruz with Fonna Forman, the self-organized senior initiative Stille Straße 10 and the Assemble architects' collective from London, the Kooperatives Labor Studierender (Kolabs) and Atelier Bow-Wow from Tokyo, and the Brussels architectural office Dogma and the Realism Working Group from Frankfurt.

Publications are available at the HKW bookshop, bookstores and online at Spector Books.